i been down-hearted, baby.

Paid my bills before running off to work; had a stack of 'em and had missed one. Checked my balance online.
Heh. It's a tight squeeze.

Signed the last check, went to click the pen shut. Button was stuck. Smacked it on my new work khakis to unstick it.
Pen explodes. Ink on new khakis.

There's a nice Fuck You from Fate, eh?

Go to work, thinking, "At least I'm not training anymore, so I can make some tips."

There's a bartender standing behind the bar.

"Hi, I dunno why, the bar owner wanted me to train you to close."
"You trained me to close last week. I know how to close."
"I know, I told him he was crazy, but he insisted. So, here I am." (a few minutes later) "Yeah, you know what you're doing. I'm going to go sit down at the end of the bar and chat with my friends."
"Sure. Great. Awesome."

(six hours later)

"Man, it was slow tonight. I only made $50."
Me: "That's $50 more than i've ever made." (Thinking: And that's $50 I just personally put into that jar, too.)
"Yeah, that sucks. Oh, and he wants you to have someone with you Thursday night too."
Me, dumbfounded: "That'd be my sixth night of training." (Industry average is between three and five. In case I didn't explain, when you're in training your tips go to your trainer.)
"Really? That's crazy. That sucks, man. You aren't making any money!"
Me: "Gosh, really? I hadn't noticed."


So, here I am. Ink-stained, and broker than I was this morning. Yeah.

It was TOTALLY worth getting out of bed today.

Oh no wait---- it wasn't.

FUCK.

And you know the shittiest part? The other job, the manager screwed up the scheduling and put me on tonight, even though i'd already told him I couldn't work Tuesday nights.
So I told him no.

I could have worked an 8-hour shift in a busy bar.
Where I would have been allowed to keep my tips instead of giving them to the girl sitting down at the end of the bar talking with her friends.

Yeah.

gh

too mad to sleep.
stayed up until 3 rereading everything in my fanfic folder. yeah. that eomer/lothiriel story would've been great if i'd ever finished it. i had some great moments in there with faramir. oh well.

i was calmed down enough to go to sleep around 3ish, but i'm awake again now and can't sleep.
i'm just all sore-muscled and my feet hurt, and....

my plans for today (another day off, since my schedule blows this week):
1) go to craft or office supply store and purchase nice blank photo album
2) go to grocery or drug store and use their special printers to print out my digital photos of Scout
3) put photos of Scout into photo album
4) wrap
5) mail to Katy and Adam as Xmas gift to take to Iraq with them.

Can I do this?
NO.
Because I have $9 to my name.
That I made in tips at the bar that lets me make tips.
The $50 I made last night, that would have made this possible?
Went home with my trainer. Because I'm Training.

So what am I going to do today except feel wretched?

God, why didn't I go to the other bar and work there instead? I know they had me scheduled for the Landmark. I would make Penny $100 a shift when I was training there. I could've gotten photo albums for Mom and Dad too.


I hate being single-mindedly bitter but I'm so upset about this. I know, I know-- wait until next week, you'll have money then.
But see, Katy's leaving for Iraq the first or second week of January. If I don't mail this crap in time, it's going to sit in the back room of her house in Georgia for A YEAR. While she's IN IRAQ.
WITHOUT HER PUPPY.

It's sort of the point of the gift. So the "patience" thing? Eeeven less attractive than it usually is.

(no subject)

yay!
leopard_lady gets mad props for phoning me up to talk to me, even if I was mostly-asleep at the time and when Dave said it was "someone from UR" I thought it was the student loan people.

I am much cheered up.

a full day after all

I took a nap early this afternoon, and was awakened by the phone. Dave got it, and was excited-- it was the local gourmet shop calling, and the special-ordered Secret Ingredient for his annual Over-Elaborate Ethnic Christmas Cookies was in.
So he dashed off and got that, and when he came home I woke up again and he came in and gave me the mail that was lying on the floor when he got back.

1) a catalog from L.L. Bean. Whatever, stuff I can't afford. But pretty pictures. Aww.

2) a check from my mother. For what, I don't know. As she is my mother, and this is her style, there is neither a note nor an explanation in the "for" blank on the check. The amount doesn't ring a bell. I didn't ask her for anything. It is possible that she was trying to reimburse me for the amount I spent registering the car she sold me that wound up not actually being roadworthy. Still and all, it's money. If she gave me too much (I'd have to look it up), I will buy her a lavish gift with it later. For now, I am not looking it in the mouth. Though i will phone her.
(For the uninitiated, my mother has mailed a lot of stuff in her life. In the beginning, when katy first went away to college, she'd send a package and a lovely note every week. By the time I went away, it was usually a short note on oddly-folded scrap paper. By now, her fourth child in college, packages are seldom, and when they come they're usually entirely without a note. Once she mailed me a newspaper clipping with no note, and it took me three days to realize which side of the paper she'd meant for me to look at. And there was once, she just sent me an envelope with a new pair of underpants in it, and no return address. That one required a phone call.)

and 3) A lovely Christmas card from forodwaith!! I saw her entry that she'd put up, telling people to send their addresses if they wanted cards, but I was feeling shy and thought well, I've had her on my flist for like a month, so I won't. But she sent me one anyway and that made me in a very happy mood. I suppose we are fellow-Northerners, though Winnipeg is, well, more so. So, thank you, forodwaith, and I like your handwriting. :) I've been having fun trying to positively identify all the animals on the card. Is that a loon? I saw one of those in the Adirondacks one summer-- it woke me up with its weird laughing noise. Very cool. I don't think we have seals down here, though.

Dave was mostly just excited about his Secret Ingredient.

So, Dave and I, to cheer me up (he insisted I needed further cheering up), took the Secret Ingredient and all the other ingredients necessary for piparkukas and retreated to The Cookie Lair. See, the owner of this house (she still actually owns it, we recently discovered, though she has done some legal thing to deed it over to Dave's mom who now does all the bills in her name) never threw anything out. So the basement, besides the usual laundry equipment, also has two stoves, a fridge, and a 50s-era washing machine with electric wringer. All in mint condition.

So we've hooked up the fridge and the gas one of the stoves, and have set up a counter, and have all our baking stuff down there because the kitchen's little, and never go there.
So we brought the cookie stuff down and began...

Piparkukas.

I will explain piparkukas in more detail later. Suffice to say, they take over 24 hours to make so we've only done Steps 1 through about 12, and there are many more to go. These are probably the Most Complex Xmas Cookies Ever, even though they're just cutout cookies with no jam inserts or any of that stuff. What makes them so very, very complex is that they are Latvian, and like all things Latvian, my boyfriend included, are utterly incorrigible. It takes two people to mix the flour in because... well, it's just incorrigible. Dave wrote a beautiful essay on piparkukas last year that is now offline, he having abandoned his blog, but I have permission from him to reprint it, and will do so.

But, after only the first dozen steps, we already know that The Secret Ingredient is going to make a whole ton of difference. These cookies, Dave has made for three years now, they being the only thing he has ever baked. (This is why, when I met him, he owned a complete spice rack, a wooden spoon, a metal bowl, and a single cookie sheet, as well as an inexplicable set of fruit-shaped cookie cutters, there not having been any Christmasy ones in the store when he bought them. Yes: Entirely for these cookies. Other than that? He just ate spaghetti and Chinese takeout.) And every year, they have been incredible. But every year, they have also been better than the past year.

They are basically gingerbread crisp cookies-- very thin, crisp, somewhat hard cookies, heavily spiced, vaguely similar to the Anna's Ginger Cookies you can get at Ikea, but crucially different. There are half a dozen recipes in Joy of Cooking that are similar-- mostly Eastern European ethnic ones, obviously variations on the theme of Showing Off How Many Spices You Possess-- but piparkukas are better.

Largely because Dave's aunt Ruta had to take a baseball bat to an elderly Latvian knitting circle to get the top-secret recipe in Latvian, and then translate it for Dave. And then Dave has had to heavily adapt the recipe, because of course even under duress no old Latvian lady is going to give up her real piparkukas recipe. Dave's own grandmother, a Latvian refugee, never divulged her recipe, and ended up dying with it (along with the recipe for pirogs (saffron-spiced kinda pork dumplings, apparently), which Dave has vowed to discover somehow as well). So Dave's going on his memory of what hers tasted like, tempered with a little Internet research, some family feedback, and of course his own obsessive-compulsiveness.

So, maybe tomorrow (or, well, Saturday) we'll have the energy to do the rest of the steps to actually produce some piparkukas in The Cookie Lair down in the basement, and then we'll know: Was the Secret Ingredient worth it?

Piparkukas, or, The Penitent Man Kneels Before God

This is a reprint of a blog entry Dave originally posted 13 December 2003. At that point, we lived in Westchester, and were kind of tired of it. We had moved there from Jersey City, NJ.
Warnings: Language, mention of violence against old ladies.

The editor has said all she needs to and henceforth the rest of this is all vintage Dave unless otherwise specified.



Piparkukas, or, The Penitent Man Kneels Before God

in which our hero proves his heart is true and his intentions are
pure, by making some kick-ass gingerbread.

[File under: Latvianism, Indomitability]


So let me tell you a little story about piparkukas.  The noble piparkukas is a thin, crunchy, distant Latvian cousin of the noticeably more squishy, doughy gingerbread.  It is fuckingood, but you can't just make piparkukas.  No, you must first prove that you are worthy of making them.

First, you have to find the recipe.  The first year I tried making piparkukas I had to negotiate with my Latvian aunt.  It was fairly easy to convince her [my family hadn't had a decent piparkukas since my grandmother died a decade earlier].  'I'll see what I can do,' she said.  So I went back to New Jersey, and she called up one of her old Latvian lady friends.  After a hushed conversation in a darkened alley somewhere out by the Broadway market, my aunt got not one but two piparkukas recipes ... in the original Latvian.  See, you also can't just get a recipe for piparkukas.  No, because you get that from your mother or your grandmother or whoever, when you're ready, and if they die before you get the recipe, well, then I guess you were just never ready for it, now were you?  So if you want to get somebody else's recipe, you'd better make a damn good case [perhaps with a nightstick].  And even if you do, you're going to get whatever their Latvian cookbook says, which is nothing like what they actually make themselves, and you're just going to have to translate it yourself. Luckily, my aunt translated them for me, before mailing them off to me, along with a few packets of some of the more esoteric spices the recipes called for that she thought I might not be able to find.

Then, you've got to assemble a veritable spice rack just for the piparkukas.  I mean, how many times are you really going to use cardamom?  Or mace, for that matter?  Luckily I didn't have as much trouble doing this as my aunt had thought.  This year, however, I couldn't find lard, despite going to three separate grocery stores who have just officially made my shit list.  As if nobody in the Hastings-on-Hudson/Dobbs Ferry metroplex has ever needed purified pork fat.  I mean, I understand that lard is not exactly a best-seller, but I can't conceive of a life in which you don't need it at least once in a while.  I grudgingly substituted vegetable shortening.  We'll see how that turns out.

Once you've assembled your ingredients, you've got to mix them.  This doesn't sound hard, but after you've broken off three spoons in the dough, you start to question the intelligence of basing a cookie dough on honey and molasses.  Indeed, above temperatures of about fifty degrees, the dough is a completely unworkable sticky mess.  Below fifty degrees, the dough is a completely unworkable rock of spiced belligerence.

Which makes rolling this stuff out to its recommended thickness of about 1/8" a Herculean effort.  'Keep the dough cool,' the recipe keeps repeating, or you'll offend it.  'Well, the recipe knows best,' you might say, keeping the dough in the fridge, and maybe even turning down the thermostat ... until you realize how incorrigible refrigerated honey and molasses really are.  Refrigerated honey and molasses are uninterested in changing shape.  Refrigerated honey and molasses are quite fine the way they are, thank you very much. Refrigerated honey and molasses don't give a flying fuck what the recommended thickness for piparkukas is.  If you want to impose your will upon refrigerated honey and molasses, you're going to have to regulate wit da rolling pin.  [I always wondered why my grandmother had pipes like a repo man.  As with so many things in life, piparkukas is the answer.]

Sooner or later you discover how much more pliable the dough is at room temperature.  What you don't realize immediately is how much more sticky the dough is at room temperature.  It sticks to your rolling pin.  It sticks to the table.  It sticks to the wax paper you put on the table.  It sticks to your hands.  It sticks in your hair.  It sticks on the ceiling.  You get the idea.  So you reflour the rolling pin and the table.  In response, it eats the flour and sticks to the rolling pin and table anyway.

Ever wonder what happens when you roll out a sizeable ball of dough to a thickness of approximately 1/8"?  You get about 100,000 cookies. Which means the toil never ends.  By the time I finish rolling out a batch of piparkukas for Christmas, it's just about Advent again.

So, why bother with piparkukas?  Well, as I believe I mentioned at the beginning of this entry, they're fuckingood, and really are worth the effort.  And you really can't screw them up, as long as your heart is true and your intentions are pure and your pipes are diesel.


Since I couldn't find a reasonable recipe for piparkukas on the 'net, here are the two my aunt gave me.  Suffice it to say that this is just whatever the Latvian cookbook says, and is nothing like what I actually make myself.  But I won't be cruel and make you translate them yourselves.

( Christmas Pepper Cookies from Latvian Cookbook )

back to the editor now (that's me):
But I was thinkin', if anyone wants to sample Dave's version, for which he is determined not to divulge the recipe (or, God forbid, the Secret Ingredient), we could possibly be persuaded to mail some out to people. Being poor, however, I might have to ask for donations to cover the shipping. I have to find out what the shipping would be. But it's a thought. Is anyone interested?